Brocade co-founder Kumar Malavalli is back with a new venture targeting backup and recovery.

The former Brocade CTO took the wraps off InMage this week, a start-up founded in late 2001 that Malavalli says creates a new category — "data continuity" — by delivering "business event recovery at any location, any time, within any storage environment."

Malavalli says InMage provides continuous — rather than batch — protection, with the ability to roll back to "a significant event that the company has decided is important to protect," such as a large transaction or software change, instead of the "time stamp" approach offered by other vendors.

"We are building a world-class company focused entirely on eliminating the business disruption caused by failures in the data center," Malavalli says. "With data continuity, companies can protect and recover information tied to any business event, at any time, anywhere, on any storage environment."

"InMage's value proposition is unique in that it provides a true business process view for high-value data protection schemas," says Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Tony Prigmore. "ESG research indicates that 71% of enterprise storage organizations express interest in investing in the type of solution that InMage has developed. This fact, combined with InMage's strong management team, position them well in this changing and growing portion of the information storage market."

InMage is backed by $7.3 million in Series A funding from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, strategic Angel investors, and funds from Malavalli, who serves as InMage's chairman and CEO.

The company has "three key customers" — one with more than 30,000 employees — and a "large pipeline," Malavalli told Enterprise Storage Forum.

"I'm very excited, because this is my second baby after Brocade," Malavalli told ESF.

The company is so far speaking only in generalities, saving product, pricing, and customer details for its general availability launch in the first half of 2005.

InMage says current solutions "fall short on both technology and cost fronts by scheduling backups and recovery on a single dimension — time — with no correlation to an organization's business events. This approach limits an organization's ability to accurately assure data consistency across geographical boundaries or to recover information based on a significant transaction or meaningful activity."

InMage says its software combines continuous data backup and recovery with information tiering, which reduces the host footprint and data movement and provides a unified interface for protection, recovery and management. Local and remote application-level consistent copies are created from real-time data gathering and movement.